When hunger, want, fear, prejudice and hate stalk the land, what do we have to celebrate?

Is there hope?: Life is an endless fight for survival.

In India we have much to celebrate. A segment of our people enjoys living standards that are comparable to the best in the world. Industrial magnates from India stalk the planet for new acquisitions. India's political democracy may be flawed, a s it is in most countries of the world in these troubled times, but it is still robust, colourful, enduring and strident.

Yet teeming numbers of our people are being left far, far behind, condemned to lives of want, fear and hate. The blinding glitter of our land is overcast by their hopeless, even if frequently valiant, fight for bare survival.

It was a remote village in Bolangir in Orissa that we met an ancient grizzled couple, Champo and Minzi. They have for many years cut down to eating one meal a day. It is usually baasi, a small quantity of rice left overnight to ferment, with wild leaves from the forest. At night they drink black tea to kill their hunger, if there are no leftovers given to Champo when he begs. When Champo brought his bride home decades earlier, he sold himself as a halia or bonded worker, to feed his family. Through a lifetime partnership of unrelieved toil, they brought up their surviving children.

Unending struggle

Today, they can both barely walk but still, if on any day they are too sick to set out to labour, they just do not have food to eat. Minzi cleans cowsheds — work she detests — whereas Champo trudges many kilometres to the neighbouring village to beg, as he is still too proud to stretch out his arm in his own village. Yet when we met them, they often laughed and Minzi, while parting, tried hard to press into my hand a precious pumpkin, which she had grown on the roof of her thatch hut, as a gift to a guest from a faraway land.

One long unending struggle to find food for her children and herself is how Ashiya Begum from Vikarabad, Andhra Pradesh, too looks back on her life. She was barely nine when she was married off to a 15-year-old rickshaw puller. He turned out to be a drunkard, and often thrashed her. When he fell inebriated to his death into an open well some 10 years later, he left her with six small children. She sent the two youngest girls, one four and one six years old as domestic help — for Rs. 25 a month each and food — to a wealthy household in Hyderabad.

The older children she despatched to work at eateries, a plastic factory and garages. She herself laboured at road construction sites and recalls afternoons with no food, when she would fight her belly cramps by tying her sari end tightly over her stomach. Today her children are grown. One daughter was married but returned to her mother because her husband beats her. Her grown sons have turned out like their father. But recently she got a government pension and a ration card, and these help her just get by.

As a boy of 12, Jaiprakash ran away from his village in the hills, because it grieved him to see his mother negotiating treacherous mountain paths with a basket on her head, selling small things of daily use, so that her children were fed. He ended up on the streets of Delhi, dreaming that he would earn enough to free his mother from toil and his brothers and sisters from hunger. Instead he picked rags, fell into drugs, spent long years in a brutalised government detention centre, and rarely could save money enough to send his parents.

He feels he has failed them. He lies to them that he has a good job and home. "At least let them believe that one of their sons has done well in life," he says.

One night when we met Deepak, he was engrossed in his mathematics textbook under a street light. He sleeps on the grimy unkempt pavements of Patna next to his father Ganesh, a rickshaw puller.

His father's fondest dream is that one day his son Deepak would become a 'sahib'. He brought Deepak with him from their village to share with him the rigours of the city only so that he could send him to a local school. He ensures that his son gets a cup of milk each day, and nutritious food, even if Ganesh himself sleeps half fed.

Life on the margins

Education is the dream for their children of most people who are exiled to India's margins, even if it is in government schools that run without the sunlight of joyful learning, creativity and freedom. An impoverished and despised dalit caste-based sex worker in Shivpuri,

Geeta Bedia has educated both her children to become doctors. One is an MD. Jatin, a leprosy patient in Barwani, sent away his son for many years to a convent to escape any shadow of the stigma of his parents' illness; today the boy is an engineer. Street boys and girls we work with fantasise about wearing a school uniform and carrying a school bag. "Could we also hang on our shoulders a water bottle the way other children do?" they ask.

But millions of parents are too poor to afford even free government schools: legions of children work, hundreds of thousands of others escape poverty and abuse and make the streets of cities their homes, still others are compelled to migrate with their parents each year to construction sites and mines. Some — our 'special' or 'disabled' children — are virtually barred from entering the schools because their bodies and minds do not match those of most children. Still others have formal entry but feel humiliated on grounds of caste. There are reports from many corners of the country of dalit children who cannot sit with their classmates when the government statutory mid-day meal is served or others who boycott school meals if these are prepared by dalit cooks. An estimated one million children, women and men still carry human excreta on their heads as the only livelihood that society opens to them.

A violent world

It is not just hunger and want that dim the sheen of a resurgent India. It is also prejudice, fear and hate. I meet widows in resettlement colonies in Tilak Vihar in the nation's capital, who lost husbands and grown sons to State-enabled mass violence in 1984, but their wounds remain unhealed 23 years later, because justice continues to evade them. They have sons who grew up wondering why no one in the widows' colony had fathers, and slowly they learnt the terrible truths of how they lost their loved ones. Drugs and despair are rampant in these young people.

The survivors of a massacre by armed uniformed policemen of more than 40 youth in Hashimpura fight an epic battle 20 years later to bring the guilty to book. Yet not one police officer has been charged and even the accused junior policemen continue in service as prosecution lawyers endlessly drag court proceedings.

Those who were orphaned in Nellie in 1983 are now grown men and women, who are still haunted by the hours of slaughter when they lost their parents and their homes.

Mallika Begum, whose leg was cut off in the Bhagalpur massacre of 1989, is the sole surviving witness to the killing of more than 60 people who include her entire kin, and she has heroically withstood all threats and inducements to alter her court statements, or compromise with her resolve to bring the guilty to book.

More than half the cases registered after the Mumbai riots of 1992-93 were closed even without trial, and police officers named in the judicial enquiry to have been complicit in the slaughter walk unpunished, often rewarded.

In Gujarat, the Chief Minister was proud of his record of not just one of the worst episodes of communal blood letting in 2002, but of his refusal to heal, to reach out in any way to the victims, to build relief camps, to assist them to rebuild their homes and livelihoods, and the subversion of justice.

It is not just Chief Minister Modi who also celebrates the killing of Muslims in fake police 'encounters' in Gujarat. After three bomb blasts in Hyderabad, scores of young men were abducted by the police without formal arrests and tortured, the Home Minister of the State Government is reported to have said to a delegation of aggrieved citizens that they should be grateful that 'their' youth were only tortured; whereas if they were Naxalite suspects, they would have been killed.

Trapped in a vicious cycle

In Chhatisgarh, ordinary tribal people including children have been armed to fight other tribal people suspected to be Maoists, human rights defenders like Binayak Sen are imprisoned, and Naxalites kill the weakest representatives of the State as they slaughter at will police constables.

In Assam, there is no political and little social challenge to the politics of ethnic hatred of settlers by natives, resulting in Bengali Muslims and descendants of tea garden workers — brought into Assam 200 years earlier — languishing in camps for 14 years, and assaults on Bihari migrant labourers and on tribal women on the streets.

And Kashmiri young people are intensely bitter and in despair, one segment by their uprootment from their homeland; and the other by the brutal cycles of violence and human rights abuse and their own demonisation when they work or study in the rest of India.

For all of these, there seems no light even in the far distant end of the tunnel in which they find themselves trapped. A day must come when this light is lit, when this land truly belongs to all who are born to it and nurtured in its soil.